Intertextual Poetics Research Articles

The Poetics of Intertextuality in Kurdish short-Short Stories

This paper, entitled ''the poetics of intertextuality in Kurdish short-Short Stories”, was originally selected as a section in our doctoral thesis for publication that consists of an introduction and two main sub-sections and finally the results, achieved within the topic, have been presented.

Intercultural and Intertextual Crossings in Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade (2015)

This article explores the notion of intercultural and intertextual crossing (in the combined senses of migration and intersection) in Sarah Howe’s poetry collection Loop of Jade (2015). Born in Hong Kong to a Chinese mother and British father, Howe grew up in the UK. Loop of Jade explores the experience of cultural hybridity and deracination through an intertextual poetics predicated on artifice and irony, going against the grain of a simple, unmediated confessional poetic narrative “of the origins.” After the actual experience of return paradoxically leads to a crisis of identification, intertextuality becomes an alternative route allowing Howe to approach her origins obliquely. A Borgesian epigraph – a surprising abecedary of apparently arbitrary categories of animals given in a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” – becomes a structuring device for the whole collection, announcing its project to reflect on real or imaginary cultural differences. Working through various constructions and misconceptions of Asia in the Western imagination, the poems ultimately develop a complex sense of belonging. This article argues that Howe uses a multiplicity of intertexts to create what Homi Bhabha calls an “in-between,” interstitial subjectivity, which reflects on its intercultural plurality and fragmentation, and explores the degree to which modern identity is shaped by cultural differences. It also explores the political dimensions of Howe’s use of intertextuality, denouncing China’s history of repression and censorship, as well as the violence against women and the anxiety of miscegenation in traditional culture. Finally, I also show that Howe ambivalently engages with the legacy of modernist poetry, particularly with Ezra Pound’s appropriation of Chinese culture and writing system.

Не (совсем) акмеистическая трагедия: Лаодамия Иннокентия Анненского и Юдифь Николая Недоброво

This article analyzes the intertextuality and motifs of the tragedies Laodamia by Innokenty Annensky and Judith by Nikolai Nedobrovo. These works reflect the main trends of Russian modernism: the interpretation of the world and European cultural heritage through Greek mythology and the Bible. Laodamia and Judith illustrate two different ways a classical text was received in the culture of the Silver Age: Nedobrovo’s reception is determined by the classicist tradition, Annensky’s reception – by romanticism. The analyzed tragedies are united by a system of motifs and images. The siege of the biblical Bethulia recalls the siege of Troy, and the image of a widow meeting not her husband, but “someone else”, is central to both plots – while Judith meets the shadow of her husband (statue) or enemy, she, like Laodamia, spends the night “not with him”. Annensky and Nedobrovo did not formally belong to the acmeist movement, but they both influenced the acmeists’ intertextual poetics.

Romantic Traditions in the Works of Ivan Sokolov on the Example of Intertextual Poetics of "Gospel Paintings"

The article is devoted to the work of Ivan Glebovich Sokolov (born 1960), which unfolds in many areas of activity, and among them the main one stands out – composer and pianist. Performance directly affects his composer's searches. Realizing the special impact of the music of romantic composers on listeners, I. G. Sokolov changes the focus of his work from a «conceptual» vector to a traditional style of writing. He creates a number of works directly related to the romantic tradition, among them the piano cycle “Gospel Pictures» (2012) stands out, in which the high role of associative links with the heritage of romantic composers (J. Brahms, F. Liszt, S. V. Rachmaninov, A. N. Scriabin, P. I. Tchaikovsky, F. Chopin, R. Schumann). The focus of the article is the intertextual layer in the «Gospel Pictures», which is realized at two levels: compositional and intonational-thematic (quotes, quasi-quotes, allusions), the latter is given special attention in the article. As a result of the analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that the noted material, which is directly related to the musical culture of romanticism, merges into a single whole with the style of the musical language of the piano cycle, forming a «mono-stylistic» (G. V. Grigorieva) musical fabric, which emphasizes the relevance the concept of extending romantic traditions in modern domestic musical culture. At the same time, this perspective of the study confirms the concept of A. V. Mikhailov about the «phenomenon of the omnipresence of romantic music», as well as its «indestructibility» and «immortality» in the process of evolution of musical culture.

The poetics of sameness in “Ottoman divan literature”

A relatively large number of writers in Arabic, Turkish and Persian came from Bosnia during the Ottoman period. This part of our cultural heritage has been quite extensively studied as the legacy of oriental languages, usually applying the methods of classic philology, without entering into the question of the value of the works. Scholars cannot agree whetherthey belong to the Ottoman or the Bosniac literary heritage; the argument is dominated by ethnocentric criteria, as they view the works from today’s standpoint, disregarding the standards of the time in which they were produced. However, this paper demonstrates that projecting our present-day standards back onto a different past is academically questionable. During the Ottoman period, literary writing was markedly polycentric, evolving in a system that was strikingly supranational and cross-cultural. A positivist approach to the heritage can neither determine nor explain these facts, which come fully into their own in poetological and cross-cultural studies. The writers of that time did not aspire to originality or to promoting distinctivenational characteristics, but were fully aware, as they composed their works, that they were doing so in the context of “the poetics of sameness,” or inductive poetics, in which tradition is affirmed as a supranational value system. As a result, the poetics of sameness may also be formulated as the poetics of intertextuality and citation, with all their subtypes. Our public still lacks proper studies of that kind; rather, the idea of ethnocentricity as diversity is still in favour, contrary to theundeniable poetological arguments in the approach to this literary legacy.

Интертекстуальная поэтика романа Никола Любича «Спокойное море»

The purpose of the research is to identify specificity of intertextual poetics of the novel “Stillness of the Sea” by N. Ljubić. The article examines the phenomenon of intertextuality within the framework of the postmodernity art, defines artistic foundations of intertextuality in the novel, identifies its main types and means of linguistic expression and gives a contextual interpretation of the identified artistic techniques. Scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the article for the first time defines types and methods of artistic expression of intertextual references in N. Ljubić’s work. The research findings have shown that intertextuality as a special way of artistic expression allows for a new understanding of the Balkan War events in the context of individual human destinies. At the same time, N. Ljubić employs standard types of intertextuality, which, however, acquire unexpected meanings in artistic space of the novel and form the author’s poetics.

Toni morrison’s poetics of intertextuality or the supreme art of borrowing

In crafting her fiction, Morrison draws on various sources. She draws on world literature, the African and African American culture, and the national archives or the official historiography. These different elements which are constitutive of the novelistic discourse of Morrison represent her poetics of intertextuality. Through this intertextuality, Morrison questions the monopoly of meaning, the notion of originality and authenticity. Morrison’s poetics of intertextuality is transgressive not for the mere sake of non-conformism but for the sake of creativity. It is culturally productive since by borrowing from different authors and different cultures, Morrison creates a conducive artistic space of self-expression. Her poetics of intertextuality calls on the aesthetic acuity of the reader. For example, there is an aestheticization of trauma or violence, which is as strange as creating beauty out of some filthy dirt. The scars on the body parts of some characters are turned into a narrative device. Art is not innocent since there is always an underlying ideology in an artwork. Morrison’s poetics of intertextality is also a poetics of transgression since it violates the canonized aesthetic literary norms. In the light of the works of Franck J. D'Angelo, Kristeva, Bakhtin, Gerard Genette, and Roland Barthes on intertextuality, this paper endeavors to deconstruct these different borrowings that constitute Morrison’s poetics of intertextuality.

Factuality, Fictionality, and Self-Referentiality in the Context of Intertextual Poetics: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg reading F. M. Dostoevsky’s work and life

The paper approaches the aspects of factuality and fictionality first in the context of intertextuality. Intertextuality is conceived, on the one hand, as a poetic device for the accentuation and the semantic evaluation of the factual within a “fictional” world (plot) created by literary discourse engendering an entire semantic universe. On the other hand, intertextuality is regarded as a tool for the semantic transposition of referentiality in the literary text into a self-reflexive mode of discourse evolution, integrating the text’s self-definition from a cultural historical point of view. In a wider sense, self-referentiality links the domains of the intratextual and the intertextual, explaining the phenomenon of historicity through poetic discourse, in a way which can be interpreted from a semiotic point of view. When in a process of semiotic reading, the literary text is conceptualised as a complex semiotic system revealing itself in its dynamic development, it is possible to differentiate various theoretical and methodological approaches to the correlation of the key concepts of factuality, fictionality, and self-referentiality ([self-]reflexivity).

CHRISTIAN DISCOURSE IN YU. BUIDA’S NOVEL «THIEF, SPY AND MURDERER»

In the modern Russian writer Yuri Buida’s novel "Thief, Spy and Murderer" (2014), Christian discourse reveals itself at different levels of the text’s organization: genre (autobiography / confession), imaginative (marginal, mad / poor in spirit), motivic (imperfection of human nature / sin), plot (the hard way the son to the father / parable of the prodigal son) and others. On the one hand, Christian allusions in the novel are a manifestation of intertextual poetics, creating a cultural context for the perception of the postmodern text. On the other hand, the Christian "code" is the most relevant for the disclosure of the philosophical and psychological content of the novel, as in Christian categories expressed by the author's attitude to the leading cultural meanings of the era, to modern man, and to himself.

ИНТЕРТЕКСТУАЛЬНОСТЬ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ РУССКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ

The article presents the analysis of specific manifestations of intertextuality in the Russian poetry of the late XX - early XXI ages. In the introduction, the author gives a short review of the theoretical aspect of the theme - the nature of intertextuality. In the main part author derives a hypothesis that there are obvious dialogical relations between modern and classic poets. The basic forms of creative interaction are regarded in this aspect. The author analyzes lyrics of “innovators” and “archaists” among the poets of the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. The conclusion is made of the difference in the intertextual poetics of the creative works between the followers of the classical or modernist methods of poetic expression. The author’s reasoning and conclusions are based on analytical publications in recent years and the works of famous and little-known poets.

‘We Listen for What the Waves Intone’: Intertextuality and the Circum-Atlantic Poetics of Seamus Heaney, Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes

This article argues that the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes constructs the Atlantic space as an oceanic intertext. Utilising Joseph Roach’s notion of the circum-Atlantic, this article examines how Trethewey’s and Dawes’ intertextual engagement with Heaney highlights how the Atlantic rim retains ‘a memory imperfectly deferred’. Through tracing connections between the work of Heaney, Dawes and Trethewey it becomes apparent that, in addition to thematic preoccupations with the legacy of imperial racisms and colonial displacement, the writers share a similar set of motifs. These poets fashion watery interstices at the margins of the Atlantic – coastlines, bogs and flooded islands – as intercultural lieux de mémoire, resonant with memory and haunted by an intertextual poetics that evokes the chorus of ‘water-lost’ Atlantic voices. This article suggests that, although the Atlantic is fashioned as an agent of disconnection, violence and liminality, it also functions as a reminder of the deep time that joins the Atlantic regions and its archipelagos, with its layers of multiple temporalities and storied pasts.

Frank Bidart's Voice and the Erasure of Jewish Difference in “Ellen West”

ABSTRACTIn “Ellen West” (1977) Frank Bidart engages with an intertextual poetics by including “found” prose from the English translation of Lionel Binswanger's case history to lend historical veracity to lyric passages spoken by West, a European Jew who died in 1921. In his representation of Binswanger's text, however, Bidart omits key points that connect West's disgust with her “Jewish” body type to her internalization of an anti-Semitic discourse. Instead of focusing on the anti-Semitic discourse that animates West's body hatred, Bidart reads West's devaluation of the body and her wish for its erasure as in line with German idealism and an aesthetic sublime.

Reading Time: Oswald Egger's Die ganze Zeit

Over the past two decades, Oswald Egger has laid out in several volumes a complex intertextual poetics. A monumental work that intertwines theory, poetry, narrative prose, and graphic art, his most recent book, Die ganze Zeit (2010), offers a performative reflection on reading and readability as conditioned by time. By means of pervasive quotation and self-quotation, Egger creates a “yarn of recollection” that intertwines different textual strands but not without indicating their contingent relation. The book opens with an adaptation from Augustine's reflections on memory. It ends with Egger's minimal, but momentous, rewriting of a passage from Boethius's reflections on time. A handful of judicious cuts and substitutions unlocks hidden potentials and leaves an indelible trace that turns Boethius's theory upside down. In the process, Egger's adaptations draw attention to the contingency and connectivity of future readings.

"Моцарт и Cальери" в поле интертекстуальных игр

The reception of Alexander Pushin’s ‘little tragedy’ Mozart and Salieri – that was originally meant as a dramatic study of envy – by the Russian literary and theatre scholars, has tended to move in the direction of exhibiting two types of artistic creators: Mozart – the genius, an artist with a Godgiven talent, and Antonio Salieri – the craftsman-composer who practices his musical craft with great skill and, moreover, to using sensational plot devices, such as murder committed out of envy, and the eruptions of human passions and emotions. The authors of the latest versions of Mozart and Salieri, Nikolai Kolyada and Olga Boguslavskaya, make reference to the romantic original work by employing a model situation of contrasting two different types of artists, their opinions on the essence of art (brilliance and genius), and their disposition and ethical principles. They fill in the Pushkin’s pattern with the realities of artistic life in modern Russia. The authors use familiar quotations, situations and selected motifs and submit them to the conventions of the game, typical of the poetics of intertextuality. Thanks to the convention of the game (swapping roles, introducing contemporary themes, such as the role of cultural policy and television in building artistic careers), they manage to avoid the pathos and philosophical stigma of the original, providing, instead, a socio-cultural image of the creative individual’s fate in modern times.

The cultural mediational dynamics of literary intertexts: An approach to the problem of generative and transformational dynamics

The paper raises the theoretical question of the cultural mediational nature of literary intertexts from the point of view of generic and transformational dynamics. The intertextual complex as mediational operator is examined at two levels – (1) in the context of cultural diachrony by observing how the literary work establishes its place in the history of literature closely connected to the metapoiesis of the text; (2) at various kinds of intratextual interlevel movements regulating the evolution of a whole intertextual system within the work. Differentiating the ontological, generative and transformational conceptualization of intertextual poetics, an attempt is made to define the basic textual modes of the pretext, the intext and the intertext by describing their functionality in the building of an intersemiotic literary system. The relevant functions are grasped by shedding light upon the types of the sign of which the given signifying structures consist (here a terminological clarification and re-evaluation are added) and their textual semantics in terms of referential and relational quality (cf. the different versions of referential and relational semantics). In the first place, however, the paper aims at outlining the structure and content of the generic-transformational semiotic processes in which the dynamic aspects of intertextual semiosis are revealed. Within this framework, the processuality of the development of the intertextual signifying structure is elucidated, shown as a chain of reciprocal sign activities resulting in constantly evolving semantic shifts within the intra- and intertextual semiosis processes, all relying on mediational operations. Text examples are taken from and references made to works by A. S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee.

The resonance of captivity

The trope of containment forms a persistent undercurrent in dominant discourses of American freedom. This article describes and performs this trope through the intertextual poetics of stories about captivity, focusing on what the author here calls “resonance,” especially between historical American Indian captivity narratives and UFO abduction accounts. Throughout this article, the idea of the uncanny is used as a way to think through various ethnographic and mediated examples of American ambivalence about the legacy of empire and colonization. The author argues that a vernacular theory of power emerges in people’s sense of ongoing parallels between various narratives of containment in America. The writing mimetically performs, as well as interprets, this narrative resonance.

A Lie of Omission: Plagiarism in Nella Larsen's Quicksand

A Lie of Omission:Plagiarism in Nella Larsen's Quicksand Erika Renée Williams (bio) Nella Larsen, one of the Harlem Renaissance's most critically acclaimed writers, had authored two novels, Quicksand (1928), and Passing (1929), when her short story "Sanctuary" called into question her legitimacy as an author. Purportedly, her story, which appeared in the January 1930 issue of Forum, too greatly resembled one by Sheila Kaye-Smith, which had been published in the January 1922 issue of Century. Larsen was supported by her publishers, to whom she provided the four detailed drafts of her manuscript believed to confirm her innocence. Yet as many critics have noted, the shadow of criminality haunted her and likely hastened the demise of her literary career: she published nothing after the controversy. The probability that Larsen borrowed from Sheila Kaye-Smith has been well documented, but I have discovered another instance of plagiarism by Larsen: her nearly verbatim copying from the opening passage of John Galsworthy's short story "The First and the Last," in order to formulate the opening passage of her novel Quicksand.1 In some of the most recent analyses of Larsen's copying from Kaye-Smith's story, her textual appropriation has been recast as something other than plagiarism— namely, a kind of aesthetic innovation.2 Such defenses of Larsen and her plagiarism implicitly contribute to a prevalent critical discourse that plagiarism in general no longer proves viable in the wake of postmodernism's deconstruction of conventional authorship.3 In contrast, I believe that no rhetoric of formalist innovation can mitigate the error of an author's verbatim copying from another author, especially when it involves pointed linguistic echoes. Indeed, as I will go on to detail, Larsen's appropriation of Galsworthy's text is too liberal—and too literal—to constitute a successful literary adaptation or allusion—especially when placed in the context of her capacity for genuine allusion that did not involve verbatim linguistic repetition. Moreover, there is trouble to be gleaned from the fact that Larsen's appropriation of Galsworthy appears as a secret to unearth and not a treasure to cull, as Larsen neither cited Galsworthy as a source, nor signaled her invocation of him in any palpable way. Although it was a known fact that the Harlem Renaissance writer admired the Edwardian author, who first came to the American literary scene as a playwright and is best known for The Forsyte Saga, the extent of Larsen's admiration for and emulation of Galsworthy is perhaps greater than what has previously been understood. Indeed, my desire to posit a fuller history of Larsen drives me—despite misgivings and regret about revealing a second instance in which she likely plagiarized a text—to proceed with such delicate and potentially damning information about an author whose contributions to African American literature I continue to cherish. I am compelled to disclose as well as analyze what I learned about Larsen for a number of reasons. First, I think it germane as a matter of literary history—especially given that my discovery of another instance of plagiarism by Larsen troubles the recent inclination to read Larsen as a misunderstood practitioner of inter-textual poetics. It suggests a pattern of unattributed borrowing on Larsen's part. Indeed, as scholars and critics of Larsen, we benefit from having the fullest possible picture of this complicated author and her body of work, even if that picture disturbs us. Second, as I have said, I resist the claim of some contemporary theory that postmodernism's disavowal of the sovereign text precludes all charges of plagiarism. [End Page 205] In fact, the plagiarist, by obfuscating some of the history of her own text, actually denies the diverse sources that furnish the proof of its multivalent nature. The high modernist and postmodernist techniques of pastiche and inter-textual allusion call forth the reader's recognition of them, and also rely upon a critical delineation of the aesthetic protocols by which they might be legitimately employed by an author. In contrast, the plagiarist's illicit and derivative use of source texts exploits her fellow authors by enacting violence upon their texts, whose fragments she lifts only...

The Eagle's Gaze in the Opening of Heliodorus' Aethiopica

This article argues that in the opening of the Aethiopica Heliodorus' refashioning of the epic tradition is assimilated to Odysseus' predatory survey of the suitors' corpses in Book 22 of the Odyssey . The initial scene of the novel reenacts an Odyssean simile that compares the suitors' bodies to dead fish on a beach. Heliodorus' intricate reconfiguration of this Homeric tableau results in his self-reflexive theorizing of ecphrastic visuality and of the intertextual poetics of predation. The scanning of the remains of the (half-) dead men figures the belated novelist's reckoning of the textual resources available to him. By capitalizing on the ecphrastic power of the Odyssean simile, Heliodorus styles his devouring gaze upon Homeric epic as a paradoxical endeavor to bring a dead image to life.

"Of the Smog": José Emilio Pacheco's Concussive Poetics of Mexico City

This article examines José Emilio Pacheco's poetic representations of Mexico City by advancing a theoretical framework derived from the discourses of ecocriticism and uneven geographical development. In combining the referential, material bases for Pacheco's poems about Mexico City, such as geological, ecological, and economic processes with his intertextual poetics, the study supplements scholarly attention to temporality and textuality in Pacheco's work by emphasizing its spatial and environmental dimensions. The article argues that Pacheco's short poems conceptualize Mexico City's development as an ongoing material and symbolic conquest of space in which natural, economic, and literary processes collide. These poems model an ecologically rooted geographical imaginary that uses literary language to measure empirical realities, including the smog that literally obscures mountains while figuratively constituting the linguistic and literary processes charged with representing them. Pacheco's ecopoetics meld self-reflexive intertextuality with an exploration of how language represents and often obscures these natural and economic processes.

Spenser's ‘goodly thought’: Heroides 15 and The Teares of the Muses

ABSTRACTOvid's Heroides are engaged by Edmund Spenser's complaint poem The Teares of the Muses (published 1591). Spenser makes use of a shard of text from Heroides 15 (Sappho to Phaon) in an effort to represent the origins of self‐consciousness as revealed in the instant of poetic inspiration. At the centre of this representation of Spenser's is the existence of a voice inside the head out of which first emerges the thinking of new thoughts. The sixteenth‐century editorial recensions of the well known crux contained in the lines from Heroides 15 with which Spenser engages point to the frisson of such inner speech. Correspondingly, the dialectical quality of the Heroides as voices seeking responses is exploited by Spenser's intertextual poetics in his representation of the momentary fulfilment of a newly created thought. In the resulting display of the immanent origins of self‐consciousness, Spenser's Heroides enable his quest to reveal the present source from which a sense of self might develop across past and future; such a development being a major preoccupation of his poetic career.